Previously

State officials reviewing the $54 million stash of cash in the parks department said Friday that they found an additional $233 million in reserves in 18 other funds — money that agencies failed to report to state budget officials.

They emphasized that, unlike with the parks department, there was no indication that the others had intentionally hidden money. They attributed the underreporting to accounting errors.

“This makes it clear there are no other hidden pots of money,” Finance Director Ana Matosantos said. “There are accounting differences, there are treatment differences, but there are not other hidden assets type circumstances in other departments.”

The parks discovery resulted in the resignation last month of director Ruth Coleman, who threatened to close 70 parks to save $22 million — while her department sat on the reserve she said she didn’t know about. The discovery of the money came at a sensitive time for Gov. Jerry Brown as he seeks voter approval of a tax increase in November.

Department of Finance Spokesman H.D. Palmer said accounting errors and hidden funds have a vastly different effect on the budget process.

He said many of the errors revealed in the review, including a $113.3 million underreporting of money in a recycling fund, were addressed before the budget process ended and that most of the others would not have had an effect on the budget process.

“Many of those errors have already been addressed in this past year or will be addressed in the next budget that the governor submits to the legislature,” Palmer said. “It’s a day and night difference.”

The hidden parks funds were not in the state general fund, but in one of 500-plus special funds that were not monitored as closely. State departments were responsible for reporting accurate fund tallies to the State Controller’s Office for accounting and the state budget office for financial planning.

Discrepancies between those two two agencies’ reports triggered the parks discovery and sparked a review of all the special funds.

According to the review, some departments over-reported reserves, to the tune of $35.9 million. Others underreported — meaning money in the bank wasn’t reported for budget purposes — by $232.6 million.

Added to the $53.9 million in hidden parks funds, $286.5 million was missing from the budget in all.

The finance department’s review examined how 291 of the state’s 572 special funds had widely different reserve totals in the governor’s January budget proposal than were in the Controller’s Office year-end financial reports released in May.

The review focused on the 68 funds where the discrepancies were larger than $1 million. Of those, discrepancies with 13 funds are still being investigated, including the two funds where parks officials hid money.

The Public Utilities Commission’s funds over-reported reserves by $422.7 million, causing the governor to order an audit of the operation to “to make sure records are clean going forward,” Matosantos said. No hidden money was found in the funds, but the root cause remains unclear.